In a game of one-upmanship, Crytek undercuts Epic Games on subscription pricing model

Crytek today announced the launch of its "Engine-as-a-Service" (EaaS) program, which is a fancy pants way of saying developers can license its CryEngine technology on a subscription basis. The cost is $9.90 per month, which trumps the $19 per month subscription plan Epic Games rolled out for its Unreal Engine 4. Further upping the ante, developers who subscribe to the EaaS program don't have to make any royalty payments on commercial products they build using CryEngine, whereas Epic Games requires a 5 percent kickback.

"When we announced the new CryEngine this was our first step towards creating an engine as a service. We are happy to announce now that the latest update of CryEngine will soon be available to all developers on a subscription basis," said Carl Jones, Crytek's Director of Business Development. "We are really excited to make CryEngine available to hundreds of thousands of developers working with Crytek to make awesome games."

EaaS subscribers will have access to same exact toolset that was used to create Ryse: Son of Rome. Now in its fourth generation, the latest version of CryEngine was optimized for the newest consoles, though it also added support for Linux. CryEngine can also be used to build titles for older consoles, as well as Windows PCs.

Some new features to CryEngine include Physically Based Shading to simulate the interaction between light and materials using real world physics, Geometry Cache to compute cache-based animations, some advances in character animation and rendering, and Image Based Lighting.

If you are paying $10/month to use their game engine with no royalties, how does that work after you have finished making your game? By that I mean what happens after your game is on the market? Do you have to continue paying the $10 for so long as your game is on the market?